by Dean Koontz
The 12-gauge boomed again.
She was down to one round, with no backup handgun.
Waiting for Harker on the loading dock wasn’t a workable plan any longer.
Michael tried the man-door. It was locked, of course, but worse, it was steel plate, resistant to forced entry, with three deadbolts.
Movement startled him. He reeled back and discovered Deucalion at his side—tall, tattooed, totemic in the lightning.
“Where the hell—”
“I understand locks,” Deucalion interrupted.
Instead of applying the finesse his words implied, the huge man grabbed the door handle, wrenched it so hard that all three of the lock assemblies pulled out of the steel frame with a pop-crack-shriek of tortured metal, and threw the torqued door onto the loading dock.
“What the hell,” Michael asked, “was that?”
“Criminal trespass,” Deucalion said, and disappeared into the warehouse.
CHAPTER 94
When Michael followed Deucalion into the warehouse, the giant wasn’t there. Whatever he might be, the guy gave new meaning to the word elusive.
Calling out to Carson would alert Harker. Besides, the storm was louder in here than outside, almost deafening: Rain roared against the corrugated metal roof.
Crates of various sizes, barrels, and cubes of shrink-wrapped merchandise formed a labyrinth of daunting size. Michael hesitated only briefly, then went searching for the minotaur.
He found hundreds of hermetically sealed fifty-gallon drums of vitamin capsules in bulk, crated machine parts, Japanese audio-video gear, cartons of sporting equipment—and one deserted aisle after another.
Frustration built until he thought maybe he would shoot up a few boxes that claimed to contain Kung Fu Elmo dolls, just to relieve the tension. If they had been Barney the Dinosaur dolls, he would more likely have acted on the impulse.
From overhead, louder than the rain, came the sound of someone running along the top of the stacked goods. The crates and barrels along the right side of the aisle shuddered and creaked and knocked together.
When Michael looked up, he saw something that was Harker but not Harker, a hunched and twisted and grotesque form, vaguely human but with a misshapen trunk and too many limbs, coming toward him along the top of the palisade. Maybe the speed with which it moved and the play of shadow and light fooled the eye. Maybe it was not monstrous at all. Maybe it was just old pain-in-the-ass Jonathan, and maybe Michael was in such a state of paranoid agitation that he was mostly imagining all the demonic details.
Pistol in a two-hand grip, he tried to track Harker, but the fugitive moved too fast, so Michael figured the first shot he would get would be when Harker leaped toward him and was airborne. At the penultimate moment, however, Harker changed directions and sprang off the right-hand stacks, across the ten-foot-wide aisle, landing atop the left-hand palisade.
Gazing up, in spite of the extreme angle, Michael got a better look at his adversary. He could no longer cling to the hope that he had imagined Harker’s grotesque transformation. He couldn’t swear to the precise details of what he glimpsed, but Johnny definitely was not in acceptable condition to be invited to dinner with genteel company. Harker was Hyde out of Jekyll, Quasimodo crossed with the Phantom of the Opera, minus the black cape, minus the slouch hat, but with a dash of H. P. Lovecraft.
Landing atop the merchandise to the left of Michael, Harker crouched low, on all fours, maybe on all sixes, and with what sounded like two voices quarreling with each other in wordless shrieks, he scrabbled away, back in the direction from which he had come.
Because he didn’t suffer from any doubts about his manhood, because he knew that valor was often the better part of courage, Michael considered leaving the warehouse, going back to the station, and writing a letter of resignation. Instead, he went after Harker. He soon lost track of him.
Listening beyond the storm, breathing air that had been breathed by the quarry, Deucalion moved slowly, patiently, between two high ramparts of palleted goods. He wasn’t searching so much as waiting.
As he expected, Harker came to him.
Here and there, narrow gaps in each wall of crates gave a view of the next aisle. As Deucalion came to one of these look-throughs, a pale and glistening face regarded him from eight feet away in the parallel passageway.
“Brother?” Harker asked.
Meeting those tortured eyes, Deucalion said, “No.”
“Then what are you?”
“His first.”
“From two hundred years?” Harker asked.
“And a world away.”
“Are you as human as me?”
“Come to the end of the aisle with me,” Deucalion said. “I can help you.”
“Are you as human as me? Do you murder and create?”
With the alacrity of a cat, Deucalion scaled the palisade, from floor to crest, in perhaps two seconds, three at most, crossed to the next aisle, looked down, leaped down. He had not been quick enough. Harker was gone.
Carson found a set of open spiral stairs in a corner. Rapid footsteps rang off metal risers high above. A creaking noise preceded a sudden loud rush of rain. A door slammed shut, closing out the immediate sound of the downpour.
With one shot left and ready in the breach, she climbed.
The steps led to a door. When she opened it, rain lashed her.
Beyond lay the roof.
She flipped a wall switch. Outside, above the door, a bulb brightened in a wire cage.
After adjusting the latch so the door wouldn’t automatically lock behind her, she went out into the storm.
The broad roof was flat, but she could not see easily to every parapet. In addition to the gray screens of rain, vent stacks and several shedlike structures—perhaps housing the heating-cooling equipment and electrical panels—obstructed her view.
The switch by the door had activated a few other lamps in wire cages, but the deluge drowned most of the light.
Cautiously, she moved forward.
Soaked, chilled even though the rain was warm, certain that the phrase “like a drowned rat” would for the rest of his life bring him to tears, Michael moved among the vent stacks. Warily, he circled one of the sheds, making a wide arc at each corner.
He had followed someone—something—onto the roof and knew that he was not alone here.
Whatever their purpose might be, the cluster of small structures looked like cottages for roof Hobbits. After circling the first, he tried the door. Locked. The second was locked, too. And the third.
As he moved toward the fourth structure, he heard what might have been the rasp of hinges on the door he had just tried—and then from a distance Carson shouting his name, a warning.
In each blaze of lightning, the shatters of rain glittered like torrents of beveled crystals in a colossal chandelier, but instead of brightening the roof, these pyrotechnics added to the murk and confusion.
Rounding a collection of bundled vent pipes, Carson glimpsed a figure in this darkling crystal glimmer. She saw him more clearly when the lightning passed, realized that he was Michael, twenty feet away, and then she spotted another figure come out of one of the sheds. “Michael! Behind you!”
Even as Michael turned, Harker—it had to be Harker—seized him and with inhuman strength lifted him off his feet, held him overhead, and rushed with him toward the parapet.
Carson dropped to one knee, aimed low to spare Michael, and fired the shotgun.
Hit in the knees, staggered, Harker hurled Michael toward the edge of the building.
Michael slammed into the low parapet, started to slide over, nearly fell, but hung on and regained the roof.
Although Harker should have been down, shrieking in agony, his knees no more supportive than gelatin, he remained on his feet. He came for Carson.
Rising from a position of genuflection, Carson realized she had fired the last round. She held on to the weapon for its psychological effect, if any, and backed aw
ay as Harker approached.
In the light of the rain-veiled roof lamps, in a quantum series of lightning flashes of escalating brightness, Harker appeared to be carrying a child against his chest, though his arms were free.
When the pale thing clinging to Harker turned its head to look at her, Carson saw that it was not a child. Dwarfish, but with none of a dwarf’s fairy-tale appeal, deformed to the point of malignancy, slit-mouthed and wicked-eyed, this was surely a phantasm, a trick of light and lightning, of rain and gloom, mind and murk conspiring to deceive.
Yet the monstrosity did not vanish when she tried to blink it away. And as Harker drew nearer, even as Carson backed away from him, she thought the detective’s face looked strangely blank, his eyes glazed, and she had the unnerving feeling that the thing clinging to him was in control of him.
When Carson backed into a stack of vent pipes, her feet skidded on the wet roof. She almost fell.
Harker surged toward her, like a lion bounding toward faltering prey. The shriek of triumph seemed to come not from him but from the thing fastened to—surging out of?—his chest.
Suddenly Deucalion appeared and seized both the detective and the hag that rode him. The giant lifted them as effortlessly and as high as Harker had lifted Michael, and threw them from the roof.
Carson hurried to the parapet. Harker lay facedown in the alley, more than forty feet below. He lay still, as if dead, but she had seen him survive another killing fall the previous night.
CHAPTER 95
A set of switchback fire stairs zigzagged down the side of the warehouse. Carson paused at the top only long enough to take three spare shotgun shells from Michael and load them in the 12-gauge.
The iron stairs were slippery in the rain. When she grabbed the railing, it felt slick under her hand.
Michael followed close behind her, too close, the open stairs trembling and clanking under them. “You see that thing?”
“Yeah.”
“That face?”
“Yeah.”
“It was coming out of him.”
“What?”
“Out of him!”
She said nothing. Didn’t know what to say. Just kept racing down, turning flight to flight.
“The thing touched me,” Michael said, revulsion thick in his voice.
“All right.”
“It’s not all right.”
“You hurt?”
“If it’s not dead—”
“It’s dead,” she hoped.
“—kill it.”
When they reached the alleyway, Harker remained where he had fallen, but he no longer lay facedown. He had turned to the sky.
His mouth sagged open. His eyes were wide, unblinking; rain pooled in them.
From hips to shoulders, the substance of him was … gone. His chest and abdomen had collapsed. Rags of skin and torn T-shirt hung on shattered fragments of his rib cage.
“It came out of him,” Michael declared.
A scrape and clank drew their attention to a point farther along the alleyway, toward the front of the warehouse.
Through the blear of rain, in the scintillation of lightning, Carson saw a pale trollish figure crouched beside an open manhole from which it had dragged the cover.
At a distance of thirty feet, in the murk of the tropical storm, she could see few details of the thing. Yet she knew that it was staring at her.
She raised the shotgun, but the pallid creature dropped into the manhole, out of sight.
Michael said, “What the hell was that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe … maybe I don’t want to know.”
CSI, ME personnel, a dozen jakes, and the usual obnoxious gaggle of media types had come, and the storm had gone.
The buildings dripped, the puddled street glistened, but nothing looked clean, nothing smelled clean, either, and Carson suspected that nothing would ever quite feel clean again.
Jack Rogers had shown up to oversee the handling and transport of Jonathan Harker’s remains. He was determined not to lose evidence this time.
At the back of the plainwrap sedan, stowing the shotgun, Carson said, “Where’s Deucalion?”
Michael said, “Probably had a dinner date with Dracula.”
“After what you’ve seen, you aren’t still resisting this?”
“Let’s just say that I’m continuing to process the data.”
She slapped him affectionately—but hard enough—alongside the head. “Better get an upgraded logic unit.”
Her cell phone rang. When she answered it, she heard Vicky Chou in a panic.
CHAPTER 96
Finished, programmed, having received a downloaded education in language and other basics, Erika Five lay in the sealed glass tank, awaiting animation.
Victor stood over her, smiling. She was a lovely creature.
Although four Erikas had failed him, he had high hopes for the fifth. Even after two hundred years, he was learning new techniques, better design solutions.
He keyed commands into the computer that was associated with this tank—number 32—and watched as the milky solution in which Erika lay was cycled out of the container to be replaced with a clear cleansing solution. Within a few minutes, this second bath drained, leaving her dry and pink.
The numerous electrodes, nutrient lines, drains, and service tubes connected to her automatically withdrew. At this decoupling, she bled from a few veins, but only for a moment; in members of the New Race, such small wounds healed in seconds.
The curved glass lid opened on pneumatic hinges as a triggering shock started Erika breathing on her own.
Victor sat on a stool beside the tank, leaned forward, his face close to hers.
Her luxurious eyelashes fluttered. She opened her eyes. Her gaze was first wild and fearful. This was not unusual.
When the moment was right and Victor knew she had passed from birth shock to engagement, he said, “Do you know what you are?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know why you are?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know who I am?”
For the first time, she met his eyes. “Yes.” Then she lowered her gaze with a kind of reverence.
“Are you ready to serve?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to enjoy using you.”
She glanced at him again, and then humbly away.
“Arise,” he said.
The tank revolved a quarter of a turn, allowing her to swing her legs out easily, to stand.
“I have given you a life,” he said. “Remember that. I have given you a life, and I will choose what you do with it.”
CHAPTER 97
On the dark and rain-soaked lawn, a supermarket shopping cart full of aluminum cans and glass bottles stood alongside the house, near the back porch.
Carson, followed by Michael, glanced at the cart, puzzled, as she hurried past it to the porch steps.
Vicky Chou, in a robe and slippers, waited in the kitchen. She held a meat fork as if she intended to use it as a weapon.
“The doors were locked. I know they were,” she said.
“It’s all right, Vic. Like I told you on the phone, I know him. He’s all right.”
“Big, tattooed, really big,” Vicky told Michael. “I don’t know how he got in the house.”
“He probably lifted the roof off,” Michael said. “Came down through the attic.”
Deucalion stood in Arnie’s room, watching the boy work on the castle. He looked up as Carson and Michael came through the door.
Arnie spoke to himself, “Fortify. Fortify. Fortify and defend.”
“Your brother,” Deucalion said, “sees deeply into the true nature of reality.”
Mystified by this statement, Carson said, “He’s autistic.”
“Autistic … because he sees too much, too much yet not enough to understand what he sees. He mistakes complexity for chaos. Chaos scares him. He struggles to bring order to his world.”
Michael s
aid, “Yeah. After everything I’ve seen tonight, I’m struggling, too.”
To Deucalion, Carson said, “Two hundred years … you and this Victor Frankenstein … So why now? Why here?”
“On the night I came alive … perhaps I was given the task of destroying Victor when the moment arrived.”
“Given by whom?”
“By whoever created the natural order that Victor challenges with such anger and such ego.”
Deucalion took a penny from the stack on the table, which he had given earlier to Arnie. He flipped it, snatched it from midair, clutched it in his fist, opened his hand. The penny was gone.
“I have free will,” Deucalion said. “I could walk away from my destiny. But I won’t.”
He flipped the penny again.
Carson watched him, transfixed.
Again he snatched it, opened his hand. No penny.
Michael said, “Harker and these … these other things Victor has made—they’re demonic. But what about you? Do you have …”
When Michael hesitated, Carson finished his question: “Man-made and yet … do you have a soul? That lightning … did it bring you one?”
Deucalion closed his hand, opened it an instant later, and the two missing pennies were on his palm. “All I know is … I suffer.”
Arnie had stopped working on the castle. He rose from his chair, mesmerized by the two pennies on Deucalion’s palm.
“I suffer guilt, remorse, contrition. I see mysteries everywhere in the weave of life … and I believe.”
He put the pennies in Arnie’s open hand.
“Victor was a man,” Deucalion continued, “but made a monster of himself. I was a monster … but feel so human now.”
Arnie closed his fist around the coins and at once opened it.
Carson’s breath caught. The pennies were gone from Arnie’s hand.
“Two hundred years,” Deucalion said, “I’ve lived as an outsider in your world. I’ve learned to treasure flawed humanity for its optimism in spite of its flaws, for its hope in the face of ceaseless struggle.”